But you are not skeptical about correlations between programming talent and gender, are you?

I'm not really familiar enough with the subject to know whether I should be. If there are any serious studies out there about gender and code quality, I'd love to read them. While gender itself may well be irrelevant when it comes to programming aptitude, the way that a society treats girls and women (and the fact that it may be (is, for mine) different than the way it treats boys and men) could influence how many/which women go into the world of programming, which might in turn influence the quality of what they produce.

I can't remember ever meeting a female programmer that I didn't later come to respect for their skill. Anecdotal evidence isn't really useful, though.

edit: Good point. I guess that if a correlation may exist for women by this logic, it may well also exist for non-mainstream sexual orientations.

a "real man"? I'm a straight white male and I'm insulted by that statement.

You have to be a troll to say something as ignorant as that.

There's (in my country) something of a running joke concerning "WASP"s and the archetype I get lumped into.

It's just part of the whole mise en scene concerning my background and about how I'm supposed to be some sort of ignorant rich bastard or something. (FTR, I'm quite poor, an an atheist.)

I find it interesting you decided not to mention the point I was raising.

EDITS: Grammar, additions.

So you are not a WASP. Case closed.

I'm white and anglo saxon, the stereotype is created when someone sees me in person. That's the point.

You're a semantic troll. Bugger off YC, seriously.

My sample is 3-4 : bad. 0.8 (suspected gay) : good. That's not counting Von Neumann. This isn't statistically significant. That's why I'm asking about others' opinions. Why is everyone so quick to say girls tend to be bad programmers, but gay programmers are a touchy subject?

This is not a troll. I'm just stimulating a discussion that AFAIK has never taken place before.

Thanks

Girls are bad programmers? What is this, grade school?

For the record I've only ever met one gay programmer and he was "bad".

He'd never coded prior to school, and he treated it purely as a "career" in which he thought he could make "good money".

It was his attitude towards the profession and not his actual skill that bothered me. An earnest but poor programmer can be fixed and is respectable, the sort of fuck that floods our profession with these ideas that we make insane money or something is obnoxious.

EDIT: Never gave a shit or a thought at any point to the fact that he was gay.

It makes sense, actually. If you do programming full-time, your brain is too tired to think about how to best market your product, etc. When I program too much for too long, I feel like I turn into a machine myself, finding it hard to interact with humans.

Excellent: a combination of C's syntax and extensibility with Common Lisp's speed. That's what I've been waiting for!

When I saw the operator precedence table, I stopped reading and said to myself, "congratulations, you just missed the whole point of lisp."

And actually, SBCL is nearly as fast as C in many cases. So there's really no reason to not use CL, unless of course you don't like CL.

You don't have to program directly in an AST to do metaprogramming. It's a trade-off: some people feel it's important to make metaprogramming as easy as possible, while others feel it's more important to have readable syntax.

Every Lisp dialect has some high-level syntax, e.g. quote, CL reader macros, and Arc ssyntax. These obscure the relationship between code and the underlying AST, but the designers felt that the gain in readability was worth it.

How much syntax should there be? A hard question, but I think it would be good for Lisp to move in the "more" direction. Readability is one of the big problems I have with Lisp, and macros, while certainly useful, make up only a small fraction of my code.

I'm so pissed that I upvoted you, now that I've seen your contributions to other threads. But hey, you managed to finally make a comment that didn't call someone gay or disparage gay people... maybe some positive reinforcement will help you grow up. Good job!

But yes, I can't for the life of me understand why someone would want to use TwinLisp.

maybe they forgot what account they were on

I just had an idea for how to turn the trolling phenomenon into potentially very lucrative profits for a startup. Anybody interested?

On the one hand, I don't want to give away my idea. On the other hand, implementing it might take several people working on it for a few months. What should I do?

Give away the idea to several people in the hopes that they hear the idea and want to work on it.

I think there is value in the idea itself. If I just give it away for free, whoever implements it has no incentive to share the profits with me.

If I share the idea, I make no money from it. If I don't share, I might one day have enough time to implement it myself, or run into people I can trust 100%. If these are the only options, I HAVE TO choose the latter, and not share it for now :-(

But you have to ask yourself, what are you doing currently that is more valuable than the idea, and if that is the case, then how valuable is the idea to you at all?

If what you are doing right now isn't as valuable as the idea, then why not work on it (right now, with someone you trust) instead?

Good point. I'll try to explore how trolling can be converted into cash flow more closely. Thanks.

Troll? At least I thought at first. But the last commment was too reasonable.

Sounds odd, but potentially interesting. Anti-troll software?

I know a few trolls, but mostly small potatoes; I wouldn't associate with the ones who affect people's lives. Anyway, feel free to contact me at magus.pwnsen at gmail dot com

It's not as so much anti-troll as it is pro-money :-)

In any case, I'm interested. Let me know what your idea is and I'll provide feedback on whether or not I think it can succeed.